Drive-by Saviours Read Free Page B

marketplace, and the marketplace was his gateway to the sprawling city of Makassar, his first discovery of life on another planet.
    In Makassar Bumi became Yusupu’s pride again. With big hand on little shoulder Yusupu would say proudly, in broken Indonesian, “Smart boy, my boy,” to other fishers in the market. To buyers he would chastise the boy for selling the fish so cheaply, but Bumi knew this was for show. Shoppers could walk away with the feeling of having out-capitalized the capitalist.
    In Makassar Bumi also began a love affair with buses. He and his father would scramble from the docks to the road and hail a small blue bus—with a motor! The first time, Bumi relentlessly pressed the driver on the mechanics of the fast-moving vehicle—as fast as forty miles per hour through cross-town traffic.
    â€œHow’s it work, Sir?” he asked.
    Everyone in the cramped bus gazed at the wide-eyed child in anticipation. In the eerie silence the driver became listless, looked back and finally realized the child was addressing him.
    â€œWha?” he asked. The passengers tsk tsked and shook their heads at the oblivious brute.
    â€œHow does it work, Sir? The bus,” Bumi asked again, patiently, as the fair-weather smiles returned to the passengers’ faces.
    â€œOh-ho,” the driver said, amused by Bumi’s pomposity. As if a small child could understand such big things. “The wheels turn,” the driver said, “and that makes it go.” The passengers groaned.
    â€œWhat makes the wheels turn?” Bumi asked. “How’s that make it go? Why’s there smoke? Why’s it stink?” The passengers laughed. “And why so many busses and where’d they come from? Where’d the trees go?”
    The passengers’ heads slowly pivoted in unison to gauge the driver, whose eyes were fixed to the side of the road while people signalled for a ride unheeded. He was completely silent. The passengers stared at him from every angle of the bus.
    Finally Pak Syamsuddin, a young schoolteacher, broke the silence. “Have you never been on a bus before?” he asked.
    â€œNo, Sir,” Bumi said. “Boats only.”
    â€œMotorboats?” Syamsuddin asked.
    â€œYa. Fishing boats.”
    â€œWell, the principle is not so different.”
    It was the first time anyone had used a word as big and weighty as ‘principle’ when addressing Bumi, and he had never fully considered the principle on which a boat worked before. They were just there and moving away from one shore and toward another endlessly, since his birth, and surely forever before that. He finally asked, “What principle is that?” Syamsuddin explained briefly about Newton’s laws, friction and the energy generated from combustion. Bumi’s eyes grew even wider. Syamsuddin asked Bumi if he understood.
    â€œSo, you make a spark, light the fuel to turn a wheel or propeller, which makes friction, and a force in one direction. It sends the bus the other way?”
    â€œMore or less,” Syamsuddin said, duly impressed but not wanting to give the tiny child a bigger head than he could carry on his small shoulders. “Eventually you’ll learn all this in school.”
    HERE WAS THE ONLY INDONESIAN WORD YUSUPU KNEW AND BUMI didn’t: ‘school.’ Yusupu had never been there, but he had heard rumours in the market about other Indonesian villagers that had been taken there against their will. Government officials, he was told, would come to town and take away the children so that they could go to school and become more civilized.
    Yusupu, who had been proudly and quietly listening until this point, interjected. “No school for Bumi,” he said. “He’s smart enough. We need this boy. He sells fish. He counts money.”
    â€œWhat’s school, Daddy?” Bumi asked his father in Indonesian, a language he had learned from his mother.